Since the development of the photocomposing machine, photocomposing has grown to a position of major importance in the typesetting field. Although complex computerized photocomposing machines have geen developed with the capability to rapidly compose a large number of characters from type faces of diferent designs, such machines are extremely expensive. No photocomposing machine has been developed which employs conventional, relatively inexpensive logic control systems and techniques to facilitate the photocomposing of thousands of characters without requiring the changing of type fonts.
Although photocomposing technology relating to composition in the English language is quite advanced, photocomposition in many foreign languages is still in a very rudimentary stage. For example, even with expensive computerized photocomposing machines, it is still extremely difficult to effectively compose in Japanese. Even a single type font including enough Japanese characters, punctuation, and English characters to provide an adequate range for Japanese composition must include over four thousand characters. For a photocomposing machine to be able to compose characters from just two type fonts with Japanese type faces of different design without a font change, over eight thousand characters are required. These requirements present keyboarding problems and character coding and selection requirements which have not been adequately solved.
To accomplish justification when lines are photocomposed in English, the spaces between words in a line are adjusted. However, with Japanese characters, there are no word spaces to adjust, but the Japanese rules of inhibition, which require that certain characters known as Kanji be followed by other characters known as Kana, make justification desirable. Also, the justification of Japanese type is rendered more difficult by the fact that English words and characters are normally interspersed with Japanese characters in print.
A photocomposing machine having the capability to compose the thousands of characters required for Japanese photocomposition would be readily adaptable for use with the English language, and with smaller alphabets, would have trmendous capabilities.
It is a primary object of the present invention to provide a novel and improved photocomposing machine and method for composing thousands of characters without requiring computerization or type font substitution.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a novel and improved photocomposing machine which is adapted to select characters from a plurality of simultaneously rotating drums; each drum containing many hundreds of characters.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a novel and improved photocomposing machine which is adapted to employ a single functional main keyboard to select characters displayed on both the main keyboard and a plurality of display keyboards.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a novel method of justification for characters of substantially two different width sizes wherein the smaller width characters are sensed and used in justification.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a novel method for automating a photocomposing machine to operate in an automatic end of line mode.
A still further object of this invention is to provide a novel method for justifying characters such as Japanese characters wherein major unit spaces such as those provided by punctuation are first sensed and used for justification and subsequently unit spaces available from characters of smaller width size are sensed and used for justification.